PROCESSING OF DISFLUENCIES AS A FUNCTION OF ERROR TYPE AND AGE

The effects that speakers disfluencies have on the listener are rather complex. Speech perception is an incredibly fast process, given that while the mechanism interprets the incoming waveform as a series of linguistic segments and suprasegmentals, it is also continuously ready to receive and correct the incoming erroneous messages. The goal of the present experiment was to describe the correction process and determine its efficiency. Various types of disfluency were tested with nine-year-old children, young adults, and elders. The results show that the time span of the corrective process depends upon the type of disfluency, the context, and the listeners age. The higher operational level the production error involves the more time is required for correcting it and the corrections are poorer than at lower operational levels.